Brief Initial Impressions of Dungeonaday.com

It’s been a long day and I’m pretty much shot but I wanted to comment on Monte Cook’s Dungeonaday.com before I shut down for the night. As you might imagine, I have some interest in seeing how this project develops in light of my own efforts to develop and exhibit a megadungeon of my own.

I’m attempting to approach Cook’s project with as few preconceived notions as possible. To be rather honest, its success or failure will have little impact on my own efforts and I don’t have any vested interest in something that’s using the 3.5 system, no matter how “rules light” that may be. I also have no plans at the moment to become a subscriber but I’ve long since learned to never set such intentions in stone.

My gut response to what little is available and what I’ve been able to process through my tired mind is this:

- The use of the Dwarven Forge models to detail the individual encounter areas is a nice touch. I’m a sucker for little touches like that and it’s one that I would have never thought to include on my own. Then again, I can’t paint all that well and don’t have a big inventory of Dwarven Forge pieces to draw from.

- I’d forgotten how much text is required to describe a simple encounter in 3.5. I’m aware that Cook has to make the content of the dungeon both beefy enough to justify a paying audience and that he’s has to make his encounters as descriptive as possible so that they can be run according to “the script”, but after my own efforts to trim down my dungeon notes to the bare minimum, these elaborate room descriptions look odd to me.

- My honest-to-goodness reaction to seeing the map for Level One was, “That’s it? That’s a so-called megadungeon level?” I’m aware that this could easily be built upon and more might be forthcoming, but that was my honest first impression.

I’m going to reserve commenting further until I have a chance to really sit down and digest the available material. In the meantime, I’m going to go with the Mythbusters method of judging the viability of Dungeonaday.com and call this one “plausible.”